Achieving restoration, conservation and poverty alleviation goals through Indonesia’s community forests

Global area-based restoration targets frequently overlook trade-offs between climate, biodiversity, and poverty alleviation goals, and so struggle to scale. We address this by developing a multi-objective spatial optimisation framework for Indonesia’s social forestry programme - a 14.1 million hectare bellwether for community-led conservation worldwide. Integrating high-resolution data across 81,912 villages, we identify an ‘optimisation dividend’ that could shift the programme from reactive licensing toward more strategic allocation. Spatially targeting the top-ranked 10% of eligible land captures an additional 23% of combined restoration, conservation and social benefits, outperforming random allocation by double. Optimisation maximises efficiency in achieving the three objectives in western Indonesia while primarily supporting reparative justice and Indigenous tenure in the east. Our findings demonstrate that synergistic social and environmental outcomes depend fundamentally on deliberate spatial design. This framework provides a scalable roadmap to transform ambitious restoration and area-based conservation pledges into socially legitimate, ecologically impactful land-use policies.